04 | 02:30 PM - 03:45 PM

Fireside Chat: Kurt Loder, author, “The Good, the Bad and the Godawful” with Owen Gleiberman, film critic, Entertainment Weekly.

Kurt Loder, Author & Film Critic, “The Good, the Bad and the Godawful”

Book signing and sale immediately following fireside chat.

Kurt Loder is a writer living in New York. He is a film critic, author, columnist, and MTV television personality who served as editor at Rolling Stone. He has contributed to articles in Reason, Esquire, Details, New York, and Time.

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Kurt Loder, Author, “The Good, the Bad and the Godawful”
Kurt Loder is an author, columnist, film critic and longtime television presence. He was a staff writer and senior editor at Rolling Stone for nine years, and remains a contributing editor for the magazine. He was also the writer and host of MTV’s The Week in Rock for more than a decade, and, starting in 2004, the movie-reviewer for the channel’s Website, MTV.com. He was the writer of Tina Turner’s 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, a New York Times best-seller, and also a consultant for What’s Love Got to Do with It, the 1993 movie made from that book. His 1990 book, Bat Chain Puller, a collection of his work for Rolling Stone, was reissued in 2002 by Cooper Square Press. He has contributed to a number of magazines, Esquire and New York and Time among them; and has written liner notes for albums by many acts, from the Velvet Underground and the Ramones to David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. He has appeared on TV shows ranging from Saturday Night Live to The Simpsons, and in more than a dozen movies – always briefly, and inevitably as himself – most of them on the level of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. He currently writes about movies for Reason Online, the Reason magazine Website, as well as other Internet outlets. He lives in New York City.

Book Description:
The Good, the Bad and the Godawful is a lively excavation of some of the most notable movies of recent years – the over-hyped, the under-loved, the rousing, the wretched and the even-worse. But this collection of some 200 reviews is more than just a procession of blurb-fodder raves and snotty potshots. Over the course of decades of watching films, interviewing filmmakers, and hanging around on sets and locations, the author has learned how grindingly hard it is to make movies. Nobody sets out to make a bad one, and yet many bad ones are made every year, some of them very expensively. Could anyone involved with the dismal Golden Compass really have thought that picture would ignite a world-conquering franchise? Did Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie have any inkling of how awful The Tourist would turn out to be? Will Oliver Stone and Nicolas Cage ever come to their senses? Some failed films may deserve the benefit of a doubt. Others, in a word, don’t. (Can there be any explanation for the acclaim heaped upon Michael Moore’s fraudulent health-care polemic, Sicko?) The book also considers a number of excellent big-studio films, like David Fincher’s Zodiac, that mysteriously slumped at the box office. And some obscure jewels, like Terribly Happy and The Saddest Music in the World, that cry out to be discovered on DVD. It also answers the question of whether there can be anything good to say about low-rent quickies like The Midnight Meat Train and Jackass 3D. (The answer is yes.)

Digital Hollywood Content Summit X - Wednesday, March 7, 2012